Co-Inhered Flesh: Incarnational Performance Theology in the Plays of Charles Williams

Abstract

While remembered chiefly as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a member of the Inklings, Charles Williams (1886–1945) also deserves critical attention and analysis as a prolific and successful playwright, who made a unique and insufficiently recognised contribution to both the specific revival of religious verse drama and to the broader development of modern drama in the earlier part of the twentieth century. It is in his plays that Williams is best able to realize his unique literary and theological vision of what he termed Co-inherence. This belief in the mutual interdependence of the spiritual and physical realm, where the natural and supernatural co-exist, arose from Williams’s particular understanding of the Incarnation: the Word made flesh in the person of Christ. In striking and distinctive contrast with his prose and poetry, it is in the physical realm of the theatre that Williams was able to create, in live performance, an aesthetic of co-inhered flesh that physically embodied his unique incarnational theology. After first locating Williams’s plays within the context of his contemporary verse dramatists and religious thinkers, and surveying the extensive critical and biographical literature relevant to this topic, and establishing the key elements of his incarnational theology, the development and realization of his performance theology of co-inhered flesh is traced in its evolving complexity and various facets, expressions and characterisations through an investigation of all of Williams’s known plays, including his published and recently re-discovered unpublished works, and by considering five key aspects of his dramatic realization of his theory: his vision of the City, his notion of love, his sense of time, his apprehension of the Deity, and his understanding of the nature of evil.